ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book looks at the division of the early modern material world into the legally, economically, and personally important categories of mobile and immobile property and possession as well as the rights to usufruct. It deals with gifts, symbolic values, and strategies and covers the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth century in Norway, Scotland, and Tyrol. The book brings together two case studies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and reflects on the question of if and how access to land was enhanced or restricted to women. It looks at law and custom in respect to immobile property in the Ottoman Empire during the first half of the eighteenth century. The book presents examples from the early to third quarter of the nineteenth century and looks at the monetisation of property in geographically, politically, and culturally transitory zones.
